Leaning against the studio wall, stand all these.
This theater caper took me away from everything. I stopped painting, stopped writing, stopped digging trenches in the sandstone, and even stopped moving large rocks to more suitable locations all around the landscape.
Now I've committed myself to do a little oil painting of two friendly dogs sniffing each other pleasantly set against a scene similar to the main section of the stage set, as a present from cast and crew to the play director. This is both good and bad. Bad because it is kind of stupid to paint a couple of dogs being nice to each other, good because it will make me get my paints and gear out of hibernation, move me to the studio, and I hope, generate momentum to get me going on all my other work.
Writing, hmm.
I can hardly complain that I haven't had any time to write. A few days subbing at the high school did eat up some of my free time, but normally, with a laptop at hand, I should have been able to knock out a few hundred words...the kids are having exams, so I don't feel too guilty ignoring them. Besides, I can keep them entertained and amused, and give them insightful educational moments while going back and forth from the keyboard. It worked before.
The problem, obviously, lies somewhere else, somewhere deeper. The first short story, seven thousand odd words, I wrote in three or four days. Encouraged, I thought that I could just keep going like that, and whip out reams of the stuff endlessly. But that first story already sat somewhere inside me, and only grew as I wrote. This sucker, which I'm writing now is very demanding of the kind of attention, that I am not experienced in giving. It wriggles, writhes, and morphs completely out of my control; I have bits written which belong at various sections, which is really straining my composing skills to link-up and lay over the structure that I devised for the story.
Also, the monster is growing in size in a way that I cannot control. It wants be a novel, but I really, really don't want to write a novel at all. I want to write a short story. Short story is such a nice form. But, how do I fend of all the all the themes, sub-texts, and narrations clawing and whining for attention. I must be strong -- it must be a short story. A very long short story, but a short story nevertheless.
Writing, I am discovering, is a very different brain activity from painting. In painting, I devise a process, and then engage in the mechanical activity of going through its phases. I need to open intuitive, right hemispheric activity and I'm all set. This word thing, on the other hand, and all the words and cousins and nieces of words I can only reach in that linear quarter of the gray matter, but to connect them to what I am trying to put out requires stunning acrobatics of linking the two hemispheres together, melting my wimpy little white corpus callosum. Practice? Perseverance? No one told me this was going to be so hard; shame on you all.
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